Can’t Wake Up in the Morning? Punish Yourself or Save the World With These Two Smartphone Apps

Having trouble getting to work in the morning on time? We’d like to introduce two Japanese smartphone apps that give the user two very different incentives for getting out of the house before it’s too late.

The first is Morning+, an app that automatically donates money to charity each day the user wakes up on time.

If saving the world still isn’t enough to get you out of bed, you may want to try the second app, MorningBomb, an alarm app that doesn’t turn off until you’ve travelled a specified distance from your house.

Both apps were created by Japanese developer Takuya Sato, who operates under the Twitter handle @montecut.

MorningBomb was Takuya’s first app and, as the name suggests, was designed to hurry the user out of the house before the ‘time bomb’ alarm goes off. While you can always just turn down the volume on your smartphone, the app also automatically sends a notification to your Twitter announcing to the world that you were unable to wake up and feel ashamed.

Takuya created Morning+ after many users began deleting the app, complaining that the unstoppable alarm was too severe a penalty for being unable to get out of the house on time.

Figuring that some folks respond better to carrots than sticks, Takuya decided to use Morning+ as a positive incentive to get people to wake up on time. The idea is simple: for every one Morning+ user that wakes up on time, sponsors will donate 1 yen to charity. Your money goes to a good cause, sponsors get cheap advertising and you get to work on time for once!

…well, that’s the plan, at least. The app is currently in “testing phase” until a sponsor can be found. Until then, Takuya is donating from his personal savings to his local convenience store charity collection box (already he’s donated a stunning 320 yen (US $4) to a Japanese disaster relief fund, though he’s only been at it for 5 days).

While both apps are free, they are currently available in Japanese only and you may want to think twice before messing around with the MorningBomb settings if you can’t read them…